Stereotactic radiosurgery is a method for treating brain lesions, using collimated convergent beams of x-ray photons produced by a clinical linear accelerator. In order to conform the administered dose distribution to the delineated volume of a lesion, while sparing healthy adjacent tissue, the method requires an extremely high spatial accuracy of approximately ±1 millimeter (mm). The method also requires an accuracy of ±2% in controlling the magnitude of the administered dose.
Because the success of stereotactic radiosurgery hinges on the accurate delivery of dosage of x-ray photons to the lesion, simulated radiosurgery using a suitable phantom, or a pseudo-object, is performed prior to actual application of the radiosurgery to a human patient, to record and verify the resulting dose distribution. The result of the simulated radiosurgery may be used to adjust stereotactic radiosurgery parameters to ensure that the desired dose distribution is applied to a human patient. Currently, ionization chambers, diodes, and diamond detectors are used to measure radiation dose distribution. (See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,635,709.) Unfortunately, such devices provide a dose measurement at a single point at a time. Alternatively, radiosensitive polymer gels have been used as prototypical three-dimensional dosimeters as described, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,633,584. Unfortunately, such gels are not well established, and require an expensive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner in order to read the recorded dose distribution.